Re:

talking to macgiver, disturbs me, and that takes a lot

What part do you find disturbing? Do you think he is losing it?

You were right and I was wrong. Humble pie, crow, or my own words is what I get to eat today. Your choice.

He obviously said something to you yesterday that was disturbing, and you don't want to tell me. Just tell me -- I can take it. I promise.

My memory is a friend killer - I stopped talking to clinton when he swore, with whole hearted conviction to me, that he had done something, he had forgotten that he also swore the exact opposite to me only weeks before.

with conviction

Yep -- that is why I say it is scary and that he should be in prison:

Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/william-hirstein-phd

First a bit of terminological history, to clear up any confusion about the meanings of "sociopath," "psychopath," and related terms. In the early 1800s, doctors who worked with mental patients began to notice that some of their patients who appeared outwardly normal had what they termed a "moral depravity" or "moral insanity," in that they seemed to possess no sense of ethics or of the rights of other people. The term "psychopath" was first applied to these people around 1900. The term was changed to "sociopath" in the 1930s to emphasize the damage they do to society. Currently researchers have returned to using the term "psychopath." Some of them use that term to refer to a more serious disorder, linked to genetic traits, producing more dangerous individuals, while continuing to use "sociopath" to refer to less dangerous people who are seen more as products of their environment, including their upbringing. Other researchers make a distinction between "primary psychopaths," who are thought to be genetically caused, and "secondary psychopaths," seen as more a product of their environments.

The current approach to defining sociopathy and the related concepts is to use a list of criteria. The first such list was developed by Hervey Cleckley (1941), who is known as the first person to describe the condition in detail. Anyone fitting enough of these criteria counts as a psychopath or sociopath. There are several such lists in use. The most commonly used is called the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), developed by Robert Hare and his colleagues. An alternative version was developed in 1996 by Lilienfeld and Andrews, called the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI). The book that psychologists and psychiatrists use to categorize and diagnose mental illness, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (DSM IV) contains a category for something called "personality disorder." These are much broader categories than that of psychopathy. The category of psychopath is seen as included within this category but considerably smaller so that only roughly 1 in 5 people with APD is a psychopath (Kiehl and Buckholtz, 2010).

If we overlay all of these lists of criteria, we can see them coalescing into the following core set:

Uncaring

The PCL describes psychopaths as being callous and showing a lack of empathy, traits which the PPI describes as "coldheartedness."

Shallow emotions

Psychopaths, and to a degree, sociopaths, show a lack of emotion, especially the social emotions, such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment. Cleckley said that the psychopaths he came into contact with showed a "general poverty in major affective reactions," and a "lack of remorse or shame." The PCL describes psychopaths as "emotionally shallow" and showing a lack of guilt. Psychopaths are notorious for their lack of fear. When normal people are put into an experimental situation where they anticipate that something painful will happen, such as a mild electric shock, or a mildly aversive pressure applied to a limb, a brain network activates. Normal people will also show a clear skin conductance response produced by sweat gland activity. In psychopathic subjects, however, this brain network showed no activity and no skin conductance responses were emitted (Birbaumer et al., 2012).

Irresponsibility

According to Cleckley psychopaths show unreliability, while the PCL mentions "irresponsibility" and the PPI describes psychopaths as showing "blame externalization," i.e. they blame others for events that are actually their fault. They may admit blame when forced into a corner, but these admissions are not accompanied by a sense of shame or remorse, and they have no power to change the sociopath's future behavior.

Insincere speech

Ranging from what the PCL describes as "glibness" and "superficial charm" to Cleckley's "untruthfulness" and "insincerity," to outright "pathological lying," there is a trend toward devaluing speech among psychopaths by inflating and distorting it toward selfish ends. The criteria for APD include "conning others for personal profit or pleasure." One concerned father of a young sociopathic woman said, "I can't understand the girl, no matter how hard I try. It's not that she seems bad or exactly that she means to do wrong. She can lie with the straightest face, and after she's found in the most outlandish lies she still seems perfectly easy in her own mind" (Cleckley, 1941, p. 47). This casual use of words may be attributable to what some researchers call a shallow sense of word meaning. Psychopaths do not show a differential brain response to emotional terms over neutral terms that normal people do (Williamson et al., 1991). They also have trouble understanding metaphors and abstract words.

Overconfidence

The PCL describes sociopaths as possessing a "grandiose sense of self worth." Cleckley speaks frequently of the boastfulness of his patients. Hare (1993) describes an imprisoned sociopath who believed he was a world class swimmer.

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